Christmas/Movies

Are there Christmas movies your force people to watch with you? Every year I'm not happy unless I get my family to watch The Santa Clause 1 & 2. (let's never speak of 3. never). My mom makes us watch Rudolph. Both are great, because when Santa arrogantly says "I guess we'll have to cancel Christmas" you get to yell "Christmas is about Jesus, you smug bastard!" That just might be me, though.

I hope you had a good Christmas too because mine was lovely. I got Vynce to roll his eyes when I mentioned that we'd watched Holidays in Handcuffs twice, and his fiancee said she loves that movie too =) I'm going to buy us each a copy on DVD next year.


"They're lost in Christmas Day." - Sponge, Christmas Day

Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Let me be frank: if it wasn't for Ben Barnes, I wouldn't bother with this movie series. The movies aren't bad, but...

Anyway, I wish that the awful, terrible island was a lot more awful, or terrible. There was a lot of wasted potential there, though perhaps it might have been too scary for the kids if it lingered.

What I'd really like to read (or write) and see would be something akin to a dark Narnia. A magical land that is really off-kilter and nightmarish. Wouldn't that be more fun? Maybe I can sell the syfy channel on the idea...


"You are still in my dreams, and you're knocking at my door. Nightmares of you creeping in my head. Nightmares of you sleeping in bed. And the way you're whispering my name so slowly..." - Silver Sunshine, Nightmares

November Music

Despite my computer woes - and as a total aside, I think I know almost enough now to build a computer, not that I would. But I can now repair/replace/install everything but the motherboard, CPU and a hard drive - I did manage to listen to some music in November. List's short, but it is what it is.

Agnes Obel - Riverside
Amanda Palmer - Idioteque along with Creep and Just, Idioteque is in my top 3 favorite Radiohead songs.
Apocalyptica feat Gavin Rossdale - End Of Me
Arcade Fire - Ready To Start you didn't misread, I'm really rec'ing an AF song
Becca - Kickin' & Screamin'
Birds Of Tokyo - Silhouettic
Booka Shade - The Sun and The Neon Light
Call The Doctor - Little Bones
Chumbawamba - Mary Mary (Stigmatic Mix)
Escape The Fate - Issues
Florence & The Machine - Heavy In Your Arms
Green Vinyl Dream - Shelter
Harper Simon - Shooting Star
Hawthorne Heights - Dead In The Water
Hawthorne Heights - Lost, So Lost
Middle Class Rut - New Low
Renfey - Come Down
Smile Empty Soul - We're Through
The Pierces - Love You More
Wolf Parade - Ghost Pressure

As usual:

Bold = I have other songs by them in my mp3/cd collection
Italic = I'd heard but didn't like other songs by them
Neither = never heard of them before


"For you we fill our sails with tales and fables." - Lisa Hannigan, Keep It All

Nanowrimo 2010

November was National Novel Writing Month, and I won for the second year in a row. I reached the word goal on Saturday. Yay! To make things more fun, three of my work friends were also doing it, so we had fun sort of competing with, sort of supporting each other through it. 50,000 sounds like a pretty daunting task for just thirty days, but it works out to less than 2,000 words a day, so it's only somewhat difficult, not impossible. As far as I know all four of us succeeded, so that's really nice too.

This year I wrote a sequel to the story I wrote last year. Well, not "wrote" since that implies it's finished, but I've been working on it since then. You need to keep in mind that the word goal for nanowrimo is set at 50,000 words, but the vast majority of published novels are twice that long. Anyway, I'm 3/4ths finished the story from last year, and knew how it would end, so it was easy to work on a sequel without knowing what happens in that middle bit.

In the first story, Pull, Caitlin makes her living pulling people who died young out of the afterlife, and the Manchester police ask her for her help: there's a serial killer on the lose, and they hope she can talk to the victims to get a lead on the elusive criminal. Oh, and she's in love with a guy in the afterlife who has no interest in being alive again. In the end the bad guy is caught...and Caitlin realizes that she's pregnant, which is something she and Kyler thought couldn't happen because the dead don't reproduce in the afterlife.

Push picks up six months later, with Kyler having crossed over to be with Caitlin and their upcoming baby (and Danny, her foster kid who has her gift). Learning to live after having been in the afterlife since dying at birth causes Kyler more than a little stress, and Caitlin and Danny are also learning to cope because of it. Caitlin herself gets an education in something she's never thought about before: what it's like for the people she's rescued to start their lives over.

Before long the police officer from the first story comes to ask Caitlin for help again: someone has been forcing people who were happily dead back into life. Caitlin agrees to return them to where they belong, but finds out that she can't. Things explode into new tragedy for one of the dead she couldn't help, and Caitlin finds herself sleuthing again, this time trying to figure out why someone like her would be "helping" people against their will.

Ultimately, I'd like to write this out as a trilogy (the next story, Hold, is going to be about the dead not being able to get into the afterlife...for some reason. I haven't thought it out too far yet. It'll upset Caitlin's belief that there are no ghosts, anyway!) and of course get them published. I learned recently that the average age of a novelist being published for the first time is 36, so that let's me angst a little less that I haven't finished a (publishable) novel quite yet. Apparently 12-year-old me deciding I should be published by age 30 was overly ambitious, lol.

"must keep writing if I'm to be better than everyone else" - Jets to Brazil, I Typed For Miles